To start with I went looking for a very basic graphics library that would allow me to experiment on frame buffer devices. There is certainly no shortage of libraries to choose from. The library that I settled on was the “Lightweight C 2D graphics API agnostic library with parallelism support” written by grz0zrg. It had both PNG and JPG routines that could output to a simple frame buffer device, being written in C was also a winner.

Flicking through the various examples the quickstart.c file seemed to have nearly everything I needed to display a PNG file on my OLED. Not so long ago a fellow AREG club member shot me some icon files for our club website; one of these icons was 512×512 pixels in size which made it an excellent candidate for shrinking to 128×128 pixels and using it on my OLED.

Downloading the library was as easy as;

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/grz0zrg/fbg

If you don’t have git installed use the relevant apt-get command. The example files can then be found in the following directory;

$ cd ~/fbg/examples

I then copied the quickstart.c file and hacked on it a little, modifying it like so;

Hacking upon the Makefile is also not that difficult, I simply added the relevant lines the SRC and OUT sections, then copied the quickstart section and renamed display_logo. There is lots of information about on how to do this on the internet so I’ll not repeat it again unnecessarily.

All I had to do then was place my 128×128 PNG file alongside the display_logo executable (renamed logo.png) and run it… wallah ! I was greeted by the AREG logo on my small OLED display in all of its 128×128 pixel glory; see the image at the top of this post.

So the next trick is to move this to the boot process… So by the looks the plymouth package might be the go, only one way to find out.

After having woken up my small 128×128 OLED display I was wondering how to get it to start automatically each time my rPi booted rather than having to log in and run the commands manually.

It turns out this is rather easy and just required me to edit two files. I’m also glad that these Waveshare OLED displays are effectively compatible with the Freetronics OLED 128×128 graphics display. A big thanks to the Freetronics team for making this driver available for SED1351 chip sets.

So I created the following file with my favourite editor (as root) /etc/modprobe.d/fbtft.conf with the following contents;

options fbtft_device name=freetronicsoled128

What this effectively does is tell the system how to configure the fbtft_device as it boots, much like if we started it with modprobe from the command line i.e used the following command;

sudo modprobe fbtft_device name=freetronicsoled128

So now the system knows how to configure the driver, we need to tell modprobe to load it by placing an entry in the /etc/modules file. So using your favourite editor (as root) edit /etc/modprobe and append the last two lines.

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
i2c-dev
spi-bcm2835
fbtft_device

It appears that the SPI bus is a little slow to load if it’s called as a dependency of fbtft_device, which is a classic chicken and egg driver problem. So by starting it manually we make sure it’s available by the time the fbtft driver tries to do anything.

The i2c-dev entry in the same file fires up the i2c bus and was already pre-configured in my system by raspi-config way back when. I’m using it in my project, YMMV. All that is left to do is test it, so reboot and login and run the following command;

I recently found myself at the very limits of what you can ask an Arduino Uno to do, both in terms of flash and speed. I’ve used Atmel AVR processors for nearly 20 years so I know them and their foibles very well.

At work a while back we started using various STM32 processors and that has been somewhat enjoyable, I now like throwing floats around instead of having to resort to fixed point maths and excel for algorithm development. I’d heard that you could run up the Arduino framework on the STM32 platforms so was keen to try it.

So I initially went looking for a well supported board and simply struggled to find one. It seemed that this space had come and gone rather rapidly. Further research showed why, the Chinese clones has effectively decimated this market due to price. I was still keen to give it ago so placed an order for two Maple Mini boards with the STM32F103CBT6 processors on them off eBay for the princely sum of A$20 with free freight. Little wonder everyone abandoned ship in mid 2016.

A big thanks has to go to Leaflabs since they have left all of the circuits, boot-loaders & design files in a GitHub repository here (click).

So what did we have to do to get these working ? It wasn’t as trivial as the Arduino Uno that is for certain.

The first step was to get Windows 7 drivers (yes I know it runs out next year) for the Maple Mini, I found some here (click). I basically hit the green button marked “Clone or Download”, saved the file on my local machine. Extracted the files from the archive to a temp directory, then via the System Manager clicked on the “Maple 003” device that appears, told it I wanted to update the drivers from a specific location then pointed it at the temp directory I’d stored the files in previously. It figured it out and installed the ones I needed. What I found amusing is it then appeared under a category called “Atmel Devices” since I’d installed tools based on libdfu for these devices once upon a time ago. YMMV.

Once I had drivers installed I could then fire up PlatformIO in the VSCode editor and attempt to create a new project. I selected the board type “Maple Mini Original” and “Arduino” for the platform and let it do its business. Unfortunately the processor I have and the one on the original maple mini are different, so I had to change a few things in the platformio.ini file; my config is below. This config is based on a PlatformIO blog post written by Vortex314, can’t thank them enough for sharing this information (click).

So what is so special? Firstly there are separate board_build definitions to set the processor and speed for the board. Thankfully the cores between the original board and my Chinese clone are similar enough for this to work. Secondly there’s a heap of additional build flags that will build in a USB serial port. So if you’re used to the USB serial to debug your code this will still work. You can find out a little more about why this is necessary on Roger Clark’s website here (click).

It is interesting that the boot-loader contains only DFU code and that the application needs to have the USB serial built in separately. In the above configuration you may notice that the VID is 0x0483 which is by design, this means the Communications Device Class (CDC) will trigger the ST Serial drivers on a Windows installation if you have them installed. If you don’t you can find them here (click).

So from within the PlatformIO environment we can write our code and build for our target. Here’s my very simple test program that flashes the onboard LED (pin 33) and will send some test data to the USB serial port.

So the last comment I need to make is in the programming of the device. When you hit the upload button from within PlatformIO you’ll see OpenOCD start and then pause with the comment “Searching for DFU device [LEAF:0003]” and if you wait long enough a subsequent message flashes by reading “Couldn’t find the DFU device: [LEAD:0003]” and nothing appears to happen.

Initially I thought my board was dead when it dawned on me… The Arduino uses a separate ATmega8U2 that is capable of resetting the target ATMega328 under software control, the STM32F103Cx is using the internal USB port and does not have this reset function (*face palm*). So when we start the program cycle we need to wait for the “Searching for DFU device” to appear and then manually reset our target to force the boot-loader into DFU mode momentarily where it is then caught and updated. Once done the process carries on as expected and you find you haven’t bricked your device.

Recently I was searching for a small graphic display that I could connect to a Raspberry Pi and fit within a Phoenix DIN enclosure I wanted to use.

There isn’t much space in the front of the enclosure I wanted to use, but a small 128×128 OLED colour display seemed it might fit.

Trawling through eBay I found what I thought to be a suitable unit and simply placed an order. There was very little information on the eBay site to tell me which display I had purchased so I just waited. When the display arrived it turned out to be a Waveshare SKU:14747 with the SED1351 controller.

A little searching around the web and I found an excellent tutorial written by the Freetronics Team for their 128×128 OLED display. It turns out our displays share the same SED1351 controller, so it was the logical place to start with my small display.

First task was to map the OLED pins to my rPi 3B+ 40-pin GPIO connector. On the rear of the display the pins and their desired function were clearly marked, so I mapped the pins like so;

I have also included the rPi pin numbers I used, make sure you plug the display into the right pins if in doubt RTFM. Once it was wired I ran the following commands to make sure the rPi was absolutely up to date;

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

The latest version of Raspbian Lite I was using (Buster) came with the fbtft frame buffer drivers already installed, so these steps were unnecessary. Since this Raspbian installation was fairly recent I decided that I didn’t need to update the rPi firmware using the rpi-update command like in other tutorials; YMMV.

I had already enabled the SPI bus on my Pi when I was coming to grips with the I2C bus. I found the tutorial at Sparkfun a really good reference and easy to follow. To create the frame buffer for the OLED device I ran the following command;

The output here shows us that the SPI bus is OK and that we now have a frame buffer /dev/fb1 that is expecting to find a SED1351 LCD controller. So now it was time to display something so I used following command;

con2fbmap 1 1

And here is what I see;

w00t it works ! Now it’s time to go and find some graphics libraries that can talk to this frame buffer device… and to work out how to display text in boxes that is wider than 80 columns in WordPress…

One of my upcoming “Radio” projects involves MQTT running on a raspberry Pi. I’m more familiar with C than I am with Python so to talk to the MQTT broker I went looking for a C based client.

I eventually settled on the Eclipse Paho MQTT C Client library, however it doesn’t come with an ARM based Linux binary package like you get for all the python peeps. Instead you’ve got to compile this from source, I guess since I’m intending to use C in the first place I should be OK. So back to the command line.

Starting with a bone stock installation of Raspbian Buster Lite I simply used the following commands in a shell;

I found all of the commands above in the git repository README.md file. One thing I noticed was when compiling the libssl-dev library generated a good many “deprecated” warnings about old TLS ciphers being used (ie TLS 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and SSL 2.0 & 3.0) so if you’re intending to use these it might be best to dig a little further. In my case this wasn’t important so I’ve filed it away here as a note to self for future reference.

So now it was just a question if the library works, the simplest way to do this was to compile the included examples and see if they work. So back off to the command line we go.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to investigate the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol or MQTT as it’s more commonly known. While the protocol is nearly 20 years old it has become increasingly popular with the Internet of Things (IoT).

The original MQTT code was donated by IBM and Eurotech to the Eclipse Paho project more than 10 years ago now and since then has been extended and massaged into what is known as Mosquitto today. I also like that Eclipse have done a lot of work writing clients for a great many platforms making the developers job just that much easier. A few of my friends have used it professionally so it comes recommended and seems like a good place to start.

So I wanted to experiment with this on a Raspberry Pi (there is a plan more on this later!), so after a bit of googling I found a nice guide written by Adafruit (click) that was the basis of what I used to setup my MQTT stack.

The following is what I needed to do to install Mosquitto on a stock installation of Raspbian Buster Lite. The Mosquitto package is available pre-compiled for ARM in the Debian repo’s so that makes life much easier;

The configuration above is just a basic one for testing. It is by no means secure or ready for production systems, you have been warned. Once the config has been written the following two commands can be used to start Mosquitto and check it is actually running;

I’ve been doing a lot of PCB assembly of late both re-flowing SMD in a toaster oven and a heap of hand soldering. One thing that bugs me is cleaning up the various rosin’s, flux and solder paste without making a bigger mess.

My usual clean up method is to use IPA and cotton buds, however the IPA has a nasty habit of dissolving the flux/rosin/paste and redistributing it across the surface of the PCB making a slightly tacky mess worse than when I started. Dang it ! I then resort to using cotton make up removal pads (stolen from the medicine cupboard) and with a blotting technique try to pick up as much of the mess as I can with copious amounts of IPA. There simply has to be a better/cheaper/simpler way !

So after speaking to a few production Engineers at work I was pointed towards various brands of PCB wash and the suggestion was made to use an ultrasonic cleaner. A bit of poking around the internet suggested that a good ultrasonic cleaner could be had for less than A$200 and PCB wash should be A$15 to A$20 per litre.

Thankfully my local Jaycar had both locally available which makes supply and warranty much easier. I also like supporting my local shops where I can.

The ultrasonic unit I purchased can be found here (click), part number YH5412. It has a total transducer power of 160W and a tank that can hold up to 2.1L of liquid. This unit is manufactured in China and if you look carefully you’ll see the same OEM unit on various sites all for about the same price. This is certainly big enough to hold quite large PCB’s up around 250mm x 150mm and has an inbuilt heater as a bonus.

The PCB wash was yet another story. This stuff is far cheaper in large quantities but I just wanted a little bit to see how we go. So I found Jaycar also sold 1L bottles from Chemtools which you can find here (click), part number NA1070. This stuff is biodegradable which means it should be ok to go down the sink, however I’ve got some 5L bottles I can decant the used liquid into and dispose of at the local EPA as required. All of the technical stuff can be found on the Chemtools website here (click). It’s worth reading the TDS and SDS sheets of this stuff and making sure you take the necessary precautions.

So to clean some PCBA’s !

I filled the machine to it’s minimum level (~700ml) and turned on the heater. Within 10 minutes the fluid was warm (not hot) so I turned off the heater and loaded a number of small PCB’s into the fluid, being careful not to overlap the boards. The TDS for this PCB wash says the fluid can be heated to +40 degrees Celsius but is designed to work between 20-30 degrees Celsius. So I just used it warm, not hot. I ran the unit for 180 seconds (one of the presets) with the lid on. The ultrasonic cleaner certainly made the right noises and there were lots of little bubbles ripping into the contaminants. I really like the lid on this unit as a warm liquid evaporates and with the lid on there was certainly condensation under the lid keeping everything in.

Once the countdown timer expired it was into one bowl of distilled water and then rinsed again in a second smaller bowl of distilled water. I had a spare pair of plastic tongs I could use to move the PCB’s between tanks without using fingers. The idea of the two baths is to get the bulk of the PCB wash off in the first bowl and then the last dregs off in the latter. It helps to change the water in the first bowl often, since it takes the bulk of the PCB wash off in the first instance.

Then it was into the drying cupboard at 50 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes to evaporate the last of the water off the board. My drying cupboard is a 20L toaster oven that I used to use for reflow soldering, nothing high tech but it will idle along at 50 degrees nicely unlike other ovens I’ve tried. I’ve seen videos online where others have used a paint stripper gun to blow hot air across the boards, YMMV.

So the result ? I’m impressed. Quite simply impressed with how clean the boards have come out of this very simple process. They are now clean and you’d be hard pressed to tell that they didn’t come from a professional board loader. Inspecting the results under the microscope I see there is very little residue on the boards, both the flux and rosin from the hand soldering processes have been completely removed. There is no trace of any solder paste balls either. They are clean as a whistle.

I will have to work out a way to take photo graphs down my microscope to show the results, my feeble attempts at trying to take a macro shot with my phone failed dismally.

There is heaps of information about configuring a Mikrotik Router as an OpenVPN server on the net. The following simply documents what I found when I tried to follow in their footsteps.

The first reference I found was Medo’s instructions on how to configure the VPN, I used this to create the certificates, configure the server and get close to a working solution.

However my configuration was a little different in that the remote device I was connecting too (RB411 over 3G) did not have a FQDN only a fixed IP. So for the ca-template and server-template I used the Fixed IP (xx.xx.xx.xx) for the common name, for the client-template I used the name of the router (RouterName).

Now getting the certs off the remote router was also “interesting”. This wasn’t something that I’d really done before. So after a bit of googling and some trial and error I ended up using the pscp utility that is part of the PuTTY package. You can find the relevant certificates using the /file command.

Once I had the certs on my local machine I could continue to follow Medo’s blog.

Now I didn’t want the VPN users to end up in a different IP address space, so I changed my VPN DHCP pool range to be just under the usual Ethernet pool and then set the VPN local address to be the next address under the VPN pool. Here’s a quick overview;

Now before anyone says anything you need to change the name and password to suit your own VPN user, at the very least make sure you use a good password. You’ll notice I dropped the AES-128 and AES-192 ciphers in preference to the 256bit option. More on this later.

This is where I ran into trouble that took me a while to resolve.

I had installed OpenVPN GUI 2.4.5 which simply refused to connect, it throws TLS errors that are odd. It turns out that as of OpenVPN 2.3.11 there was a change made that makes it incompatible with older Mikrotik routers, you can read all about it here and there is more information here.

This post also talks about being able to use the tls-cipher parameter to force the client to relax it’s checking of certificates, however I wasn’t able to make this work. It appears that the latest version of RouterOS have fixed this issue, but that has to wait until I’m next at the console of this particular router to upgrade it.

So after uninstalling the latest OpenVPN 2.4.5 GUI and installing an older version OpenVPN 2.3.10, I was able to connect to my RB411 with v3.2.2 firmware with the following config;

As you may notice I use Windows for my main machine, so Mac and Linux users will have to do a little more googling on how to specify the paths in this file. Now the cipher matches the tweak I made to the ovpn-server within the mikrotik router limiting the choice to AES-256 bit.

The proof is in the pudding, after copying all of the certs and config into the approriate directory I could get the VPN client to connect to my remote Mikrotik RB411 router over the VPN. Many thanks to Medo for blogging his adventures with RouterOS and I hope the suggestions I’ve made above are useful to some.

Well the Stackmatch PCB’s finally came back from the Manufacturer along with the components from Mouser, so it was time to build. I’m pleased with the 3D model and the actual final assembly, they are pretty close !

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I’ve not mounted the LED’s on the left hand side yet, this will wait until I can drill the front panel of the diecast enclosure and begin final assembly. Since I’ve got more than one of these to make I’m getting a template made from steel that I can mount on the front panel and then drill all the holes.

The assembly in the picture above is the first prototype and I wasn’t going to wait for the front panel and die-cast box to be ready before testing. The connectors have been attached at roughly the right height using an additional nut as a spacer, I’ve only fitted half the standoffs to save some time.

So the question is does it work?

The first test is simply a test of the isolation between ports. So taking a spectrum analyser with tracking generator the idea is to measure the insertion loss between the input and one output as we switch between all three outputs one at a time and record the results. All outputs are terminated in a 50 ohm load. What is interesting with this stackmatch is we can also select “no outputs” where no relays are energised, this has a surprising result on the measured isolation;

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OK, so what can we deduce from these series of plots. The Spectrum analyser (SA) tracking generator was on the Stackmatch input, the SA input was on Output #1 unless you missed it. As we switch each output from #1 to #3 we can see the insertion loss change. As you would expect when we select output #1 we measure the insertion or through loss of the stackmatch, when we select any output other than #1 we measure the Isolation between ports.

Here’s the all important worst case summary, which is of course at the high end of the HF band i.e 10m;

Insertion Loss < -0.2dB

Isolation > 37dB

That is not too bad for a single device covering from 160m to 10m. In real terms it means when we are transmitting 400W PEP (+56dBm) on 10m that less than 80mW (+19dBm) will be leaking out the other two ports. The same can be said for helping prevent overload in the receiver from adjacent contest stations (i.e. on 20m). The AREG typically use Elecraft K3’s and high end Icom transceivers so these typically don’t give too hoots about QRO contest stations on adjacent bands in the first place. The best part is as we go lower in frequency the Isolation increases a further 10dB which can only improve the situation.

The insertion loss is barely measurable, so nothing should be getting really hot or require further bypassing.

Now what was also interesting is the difference in output isolation with no outputs being selected and just one. The isolation to an unused port increased by +5dB to +6dB when the input was terminated into just one antenna. That is something that we’ll need to take care of with our control system, not selecting any output is bad.

So then it was a question of moving the Spectrum Analyser input to Port #2, terminating Port #1 and repeating the above measurements again. We do the same again for Port #3, shuffling the dummy loads and measuring once more. I’ll not bother putting up all of these plots, suffice to say all of the isolation between ports were within 0.5dB of each other and insertion loss didn’t move.

Now for the main event, parallel combinations.

To do this we use a Return Loss (RL) measurement, so I’ve placed the RL bridge on the input to the Stackmatch and then terminated every output in a good quality dummy load, this is important !. Then by switching the outputs in succession I can generate the various parallel combinations (25 ohms and 16.7 ohms) and then switch the transformer into to see the effect. In all cases a 30pF Silver Mica cap has been tacked across the output of the auto transformer as per our previous experiment (click). Here’s the measured plots;

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So from our first plot where only one output is selected our return loss looks excellent with the minor exception of a spike at 8MHz. I’m not sure that this is real just yet and will be doing some further work on what that resonance could be. It’s got to be a parasitic capacitance there somewhere, will track that down later. You might notice that the RL is better than -20dB (1.2:1) anyway, so a moot point really.

When we place output #1 and #2 in parallel we get 25 ohms and the RL rises to -10dB as you’d expect. Then when we kick in the transformer we see an immediate improvement of RL to better than -18dB (1.3:1) at worst case (10m).

Now when we place all three outputs in parallel our RL is destroyed -6dB, but again if we kick in the transformer we see an improvement in RL of -13.5dB (1.6:1). If you get your calculator out you find the ratios are smack bang on our design of 2.25:1. So to summarise;

Return Loss (1-output) < -20dB

Return Loss (2-output) < -18dB

Return Loss (3-output) < -13dB

Yaay it works !

So there we have it, the beginnings of a workable stackmatch design. As with any new design there is still plenty to be tweaked and played with. In the coming weeks I’ll be;

investigating the effect of the cap across the output

chasing down that odd parasitic resonance at 8MHz with one antenna selected

measuring the temperature rise of the transformer with 120W of CW being blasted into it, or 300W of RTTY to give it some real curry…

Making the final enclosures and seeing what effect (if any) this has on the design

Trying #16, #20 & #24 gauge PTFE wire on the same core to see if the performance or characteristics of the transformer changes

Seeing what effect the +/- J term from various antennas has on the combined feed point impedance that our radio will see (thanks to David VK5DGR for bringing that one up !)

Yes it’s going to be a busy few months as we explore what this new toy can do.